To work with good architecture is always great,” Victoria Hagan declares, “but to be able to work with an architect right from the beginning of a project is an interior designer’s dream.” In the case of an 18,000-square-foot house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, Hagan took care to reify that dream of hers by recommending the architect to her clients in the first place.

The clients asked simply for a “beautiful white house.” What Timothy Bryant gave them is a good deal more: a big clapboard-and-fieldstone building with a 1920s country house feel to it but with its own truth, grace and flow—call it a soothing fusion of East Coast Colonial and California Arts and Crafts. There are porches and arches galore, columns and multiple rooflines (the house was conceived to look as if it had not a lid on it but rather a top that draped in eaves over its various wings).

And there are as many windows as the building could take without being made to look too busy for its own good. During the day it is always gloriously sun-flooded, and when it’s all lit up at night, it becomes, in its architect’s happy phrase, “something you’re drawn to, like a lantern.”

Hagan and Bryant collaborated on the interior detailing, making it simple and consistent throughout—a kind of narrative on a visual level that serves to draw the huge house together. “Some architects and designers would have orchestrated a whole series of special events for the moldings, but Victoria and I didn’t see any reason to—we decided to let the furnishings establish each room’s character instead,” Bryant remarks. The entrance hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom and guest room all boast wainscoting or paneling. “I’m a big paneling fan,” the designer confesses. “It beats wallpaper any day—it adds a graphic quality and provides texture.”

One of the reasons the wife was drawn to Hagan was her trademark earth tones, so it’s anything but surprising that the house abounds in natural hues. No high notes on the color scale here—just greens, including sages and celadons, and browns, with hints of gold in them. “Victoria had said that the palette would emanate from the living room rug,” the wife recounts, indicating a circa 1900 Amritsar with an overall leaf pattern in fresh green and clementine. “She asked us to fly to New York, where she’d lined up 10 for us to choose from—it was like a rug fashion show,” she laughs.

The living room’s limestone floors bring a bit of the exterior in and are in turn relieved by the waxed-plaster walls. Harmonious forms greet the observant eye everywhere: the arms of an Empire chair, the shapes of a lamp and a vase, the curves of a Portuguese settee echoing the arches of de Chirico’s Piazza Italia that hangs above it.

The dining room, with its 12-arm Continental chandelier, Persian garden carpet, cognac-colored velvet draperies and stenciled bronze-colored walls, is not only a warm room but an adventurous one. “What’s nice is when clients trust you to expand their horizons—I always say,” Hagan says, speaking of course metaphorically, “ ‘Let’s go around the block—walk with me; we’ll cover the same ground but come back with maybe a different perspective.’” The wife adds, “I think Victoria is almost a genius at making your own vision clearer to you.” She and her husband were notably open to suggestion—the solid-walnut dining table and Klismos chairs are T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, by no means an obvious choice for a traditional house, any more than was the Chinese lacquered-oak sideboard.

For the master suite, the wife specified a comfortably scaled bedroom with an adjoining sitting room the same size. “In our previous house, we had an enormous master,” she explains, adding that the last thing they wanted here was another yawning, cavernous space. The architect dropped the roof pitch way down to accommodate his clients, and the designer went on to provide a wrought iron four-poster bed that created a further sense of enclosure.

The two and a half landscaped acres that the house sits on so contentedly also shelter a Shingle Style guesthouse, a tennis court, a Greek-key-tile-bordered pool and two poolhouses. Acknowledging that “the first thing I do when I take on a project is look to the views,” Hagan points out that every major room here opens up to the back in a considered embrace of “light and space.”

The wife proudly produces a letter written to her by a museum curator who, having once visited the house, went so far as to compare it, in its prodigious detailing and consummate craftsmanship, to the “ultimate bungalows” of the celebrated Arts and Crafts Movement architects Greene & Greene. “What might have been intimidating,” the curator concluded, addressing the matter of the building’s imposing scale, “is instead organic, comfortable, welcoming—a family home rather than the kind of mansions on steroids that dominate wealthy Southern California neighborhoods.”

This hits the nail squarely and smartly on the house’s head—it doesn’t look or feel labored, it looks and feels natural. Beautifully blended. At one with its wonderful site.